Page 21 of On Burning Paths

The shifters make it to the other side and shift back, their naked bodies glowing in the moonlight as they remove their blindfolds and disappear into the woods. The Knights are further, but Beric seems to be struggling, moving faster and faster. He’s started to yell, but I can’t make out the words.

Then, he stops, snapping to attention and screaming at the top of his lungs, “Meritha!”

Willem drops his teammate’s hand and starts to blindly sprint forward, and he’s close enough that he might make it. He hits a gravestone, flips over it, rights himself, and keeps going.

But Beric doesn’t. Instead, he drops to his knees, sliding them along the ground until he’s before a gravestone, as though he’s praying. Weeping, he repeats what sounds like, “Meritha, Meritha,” again and again. At first, he just sets his head against the stone. Then, he taps it, rolling his forehead back and forth.

“Meritha, Meritha—” Each blow lands harder than the last, punctuated with the sound of the woman’s name. I cringe at the first blow that seems to crack through bone, then cover my mouth with my hand when he lifts his face, revealing one eye socket sunken in from the impact. I have to look away as the thuds turn to wet smacks, the top of the stone smeared with his blood and gray matter until all goes quiet.

Beric, like Ulric, falls to the side and slips below the thick, swirling fog.

In the center of the burial grounds are the Vultures, their magic creating a vibrant light show amidst the fog. It reminds me of the traveling performers, warlocks of a lesser magic, who would come to our town, and occasionally our manor, to put on a show.

Except these aren’t performers. They’re our competitors, and the Ashen continue to close in on them, mostly undeterred by the magic.

Finally, the vampires move, Talon and Behanta hitting the perimeter of the graveyard at a dead sprint, clearly trying to use their speed to their advantage. And, at first, it looks like it’s going to work. They make it nearly three-quarters of the way before the Ashen close in on them.

Talon claps a hand over his eyes, high-stepping through the rest of the grounds, somehow avoiding the head stones.

Behanta is not so lucky. He goes still, staring at one of the figures, before starting to laugh. One hand goes to his belly, the other to his mouth. He laughs and laughs, the see-saw sound of it shifting from mirth into a forced, wretched gasp.

Then, without hesitation, he opens his mouth and bites clean through one of his fingers, before spitting it out onto the ground.

“Oh, gods,” I hiss, turning my face away. While my stomach has grown stronger, I’m still not cut out for seeing this kind of grotesque display. I’m not able to avoid watching for long, as a streak of violet cuts through the field, and I have to look.

It connects with Behanta just as Talon makes it out of the grounds, stumbling and turning, looking behind him for his teammate.

But Behanta is on fire.

Anyone would suffer under flames like that, except maybe Thorian and other strong demi-gods, but Behanta is not that powerful. He shrieks, then turns and starts to run. This time, when he bites off the next finger, he chokes on it, falling to his knees and puking it up as the flames eat at him.

Seconds later, he’s ash, but I imagine the finger and bile remain beneath the fog.

The warlocks are surrounded by the Ashen, and I cover my mouth with both hands, trying to prepare for whatever horror is about to befall them, but then they vanish, leaving behind nothing but the trailing, lingering smoke from their magic.

“Look,” Thorian says, pointing, and we make them out crawling on their hands and knees, appearing on the other side of the cemetery. They collapse, clearly exhausted from using magic.

“Decoys,” Fenric says, a note of admiration in his voice. “They used their magic to create decoys, then crawled through.”

“Great,” Thorian says, and I sense a hint of the anger from just after the swamp, when he was wailing on them. “Let’s kill them while they don’t have their little spells to protect them.”

“We don’t know where the others have gone,” Fenric points out, his eyes darting to the woods around us. “The shifters could be waiting for us. And you said it yourself: the night is the worst time to be out. We should find somewhere to shelter.”

Down in the graveyard, the last remaining human on the Stone Serpents team, Garrow, tries to cover his eyes and sprint through, as the vampires did.

But he’s no vampire. He’s only a human, and a clumsy one at that. He trips less than a quarter of the way through and the Ashen, with nothing else to focus on, descend on him like a flock of hungry magpies.

I look away as he begins to scream.

“We can get ahead while they’re weakened,” Fenric says, and Thorian counters, “Yes, or we could kill them and remedy the problem at its source.”

But I can hardly hear them.

With Garrow’s soul gone, the Ashen spread out again. From here, they are just shapeless forms, drifting throughout the space. Once more, the guilt and anger and anguish push through me.

I was waiting for the last of them to cross. And now, I have to do what I know is right.

After my parents died, I couldn't sleep. I would lie in the dark and think about where they were, whether they were anywhere at all, whether the people who had filled every corner of my life had simply stopped existing. It was Hilda who finally sat with me and explained it. Not the way adults usually explain death to children, carefully and briefly, as though the subject might shatter you. She sat with me for a long time and talked about the difference between souls at rest and souls that weren't. Those that had passed gently into whatever comes next, and those that hadn't. Those that were trapped—by unfinished grief, by violence, by the refusal of the world to release them—hovered in a place that was neither living nor gone.